When I get back into the classroom in January, one thing I’m looking forward to is the ability to generate lessons with sophisticated computer graphics by simply clicking a button. So fancy! So informative!
The irony of teaching about water conservation with AI does not escape me.
I think this comic strip gets it right: we live in the Age of the Dumbass. After the golden age, the silver age, the bronze age, and the age of iron, we find ourselves in this age of dumbassery.
By the way, my late brother used to occasionally send me Pearls Before Swine strips, just because we shared a sense of humor.
You’d think they’d learn. The Young Republicans had a signal chat where they thought everything was confidential among themselves, so they indulged themselves in profanity, misogyny, and racism while they were discussing their strategy for taking over the YR organization. Ha ha, it was leaked, and these unpleasant young men have been exposed. They were revealed to be repulsive people who hoped to be the future of the Republican party.
The 2,900 pages of chats, shared among a dozen millennial and Gen Z Republicans between early January and mid-August, chronicle their campaign to seize control of the national Young Republican organization on a hardline pro-Donald Trump platform. Many of the chat members already work inside government or party politics, and one serves as a state senator.
Together, the messages reveal a culture where racist, antisemitic and violent rhetoric circulate freely — and where the Trump-era loosening of political norms has made such talk feel less taboo among those positioning themselves as the party’s next leaders.
Read the linked article if you really want to know what they had to say. I can say that at least the organizer has “apologized” for the disgusting conversation.
“I am so sorry to those offended by the insensitive and inexcusable language found within the more than 28,000 messages of a private group chat that I created during my campaign to lead the Young Republicans,” he said. “While I take complete responsibility, I have had no way of verifying their accuracy and am deeply concerned that the message logs in question may have been deceptively doctored.”
Classic. He’s apologizing that people were offended, and further is suggesting that the logs were faked. He was just ridiculously bigoted, he’s been caught, and now he wants to conjure up some plausible denial.
Giunta was the most prominent voice in the chat spreading racist messages — often encouraged or “liked” by other members.
When Luke Mosiman, the chair of the Arizona Young Republicans, asked if the New Yorkers in the chat were watching an NBA playoff game, Giunta responded, “I’d go to the zoo if I wanted to watch monkey play ball.” Giunta elsewhere refers to Black people as “the watermelon people.”
Hendrix made a similar remark in July: “Bro is at a chicken restaurant ordering his food. Would he like some watermelon and kool aid with that?”
Hendrix was a communications assistant for Kansas’ Republican Attorney General Kris Kobach until Thursday. He also said in the chat that, despite political differences, he’s drawn to Missouri’s Young Republican organization because “Missouri doesn’t like f–s.”
They’ve all got the same old tired racist “jokes”. Cancel ’em all. Hendrix has already lost his position in Missouri, despite, hypothetically, Missourians not liking homosexuals.
Flush all their careers away for being racist, and the one thing that might condemn them in the eyes of their fellow Republicans, being tech-stupid. Future Republicans are expected to be racist and savvy about communications — fortunately, they all seem to be ignorant idiots.
Well. Now we have another cause of autism. Thanks, RFK jr!
There’s two studies that show children who are circumcised early have double the rate of autism. It’s highly likely because they are given Tylenol,Kennedy stated during a Cabinet meeting on Thursday.
That man is just incredibly stupid. He doesn’t understand cause and effect, he doesn’t understand correlation, and he doesn’t understand that you shouldn’t make off-the-cuff remarks drawing unfounded conclusions.
One of the papers he claims support his conclusion is direct that it is a correlational study, and it doesn’t even look at tylenol use.
The 2013 study looked at circumcision rates in boys versus autism rates. The authors admitted that national and state averages may show correlation, not causation, and said their study may have mistakes, bias and confounding. “Circumcision practices are also tied to culture and religion, which also affect autism diagnoses and health care use,” said Dr. Céline Gounder, CBS News medical contributor and editor-at-large for public health at KFF Health News.
Another expert brings up a rather salient point.
“There is absolutely no studies establishing any causality,” Dr. Steven Abelowitz, founder and medical director of Ocean Pediatrics, told CBS News. “While some observational studies suggest possibly an association, there’s no studies (showing causality) — and the conclusion by any credible medical resource is agreeing that there’s no causal relationship between Tylenol, circumcisions or vaccines to autism.”
…
“We almost never, ever use Tylenol after circumcision,” Abelowitz said, adding he’s performed about 10,000 circumcisions across his 30 years of practice.
Fire that guy.
By the way, circumcision is a pointless cosmetic procedure that you shouldn’t do anyway, but not because it causes autism.
I’m used to seeing spectacularly pretty Australasian jumping spiders, and this one, the genus Simaetha, isn’t exactly dazzling.
Australian representatives of the two extant Simaethina genera: A, C, E, Simaetha sp. (female); B, D, F, Simaethula sp. (female). Specimens are shown in dorsal view (A, B), lateral view (C, D) and frontal view (E, F). Scale bars: 0.5 mm (B, D, F), 1 mm (A, C, E).
This one, though, has the excuse that it’s between 11 and 16 million years old. It isn’t that old — I’d expect that the planet had lot of jumping spiders during the miocene — but it’s nice to seen an example from that period.
Simaetha sp. indet. (AM F.161027). Only known specimen: A, light microphotograph. B, scanning electron micrograph. C, morphological interpretation of light and electron micrographs. Abbreviations: LL, left leg; RR, right leg; AME, anterior median eye; PME, posterior median eye. Scale bars: 0.5 mm.
It’s also impressive that they could sort out what was what in the squashed bits of that fossil.
I’m back! We went to Madison, Wisconsin for our granddaughter’s 7th birthday, and also for brats (vegetarian style) and cheese curds and the fall colors and Kwik-Trip and all that Wisconsin stuff, but also, unfortunately, for a 7 hour drive each way, which was not fun. It was worth it, though, we wish we could see our kids more often, but most likely we won’t be seeing any of our children for another year, since winter is about to clamp down and trap us at home for a while.
Next weekend, we have closer plans. The No Kings rally is taking place right here in Morris on Saturday. You know, that communist antifa plot? The administration has it’s own characterization of the event.
n criticizing the rallies, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said,
No Kings means no paychecks. No paychecks and no government.
I guess we’ll be poor if we don’t have any kings.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy stated separately that the expected millions of attendees will be
part of antifa, paid protesters. It begs the question (of) who’s funding it.
Except that we’ll be paid for protesting! Or will we? I didn’t get a check for the last one.
I don’t think it’s at all a question who’s funding it. Even far-right wackos have noticed some data.
The name, on its face, is unobjectionable, even vaguely noble: “No Kings.” Americans, after all, did declare independence from one. But the historical overtones here mask something more recent and considerably less authentic. For all its revolutionary rhetoric, the ‘No Kings’ protest movement is not a spontaneous uprising of civic-minded dissidents. It is a coordinated, well-funded, tightly stage-managed campaign, backed by nearly 200 far-left NGOs, labor unions, and donor networks, many of which are directly tied to the Democratic Party’s power infrastructure. It operates not from the street, but from the spreadsheet.
200 far-left NGOs, labor unions, and donor networks
? Why, that sounds like a distributed grass roots network with many donors. The organization actually lists all their donors, and doesn’t pay protesters.
I didn’t use a spreadsheet to figure out that I have to oppose this president and his incompetent cronies. I’m doing it for my kids.
It’s time for rollerblades!
It’s my granddaughter’s birthday this weekend, so yesterday we spent 7 hours traveling all across Minnesota and Wisconsin, and boy are my knees sore. We’ve got a party to go to tomorrow.
He looks like death already
Let’s take a look at how RFK Jr. demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt in this video that he is, in fact, antivaccine. I will repeat what I’ve been saying for months now: RFK Jr. is definitely coming for your vaccines; he’s coming for all vaccines, in fact. It’s just that he’s strategic enough to know that he can’t do it all at once, which is why he purged the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP) and replace the fired members with antivaxxers and the antivax-adjacent, only one of whom has any significant experience in public health or vaccine policy. Personally, I’ve been saying that the only thing that’s saved us (thus far) is the inexperience and incompetence of RFK Jr.’s ACIP. In the meantime, President Trump has embraced Andrew Wakefield’s old grift about separating the components of the MMR vaccine as somehow being “safer,” even as he talks about adding autism to the list of table injuries for the Vaccine Injury Compensation System, a move that would certainly bankrupt and destroy it.
Yes, things are grim out there.
Fortunately, my granddaughter has responsible parents who have kept her vaccination status up to date, which is why I get to go hang out with her and watch her open presents and celebrate her 7th birthday. It’s absolutely insane that we have a director of health and human services who is committed to killing young children with disease, while our Secretary of War favors more direct execution of children. This really is the death cult coming into fruition in our federal government.
Reminder: we have a podcast this afternoon!
Jordan Peterson has been hospitalized with pneumonia and sepsis, which shouldn’t surprise anyone.
The psychologist, author, and bottomless fountain of tears is currently hospitalized and suffering from pneumonia and sepsis, as well as a spate of neurological issues that have apparently left him unable to regulate his emotions.
His daughter, Mikhaila Peterson, took to X to give the world an update on her father’s health, describing his recovery as “slow and scary”, and admitting “we’re not entirely sure what’s going on”.
The stated cause of Peterson’s ongoing neurological and physical deterioration is SIRS (systemic inflammatory response syndrome) caused by mold exposure. This is apparently the result of decades of living with mold, though it was recently exacerbated by exposure to an especially moldy environment.
Mold can be sneaky and dangerous, but he’s been a godawful mess for years — when he sprang on the scene, he was already deranged, and he’s only gotten worse. The stint in Russia in an induced coma probably didn’t help either.
Here’s hoping he recovers, but that someone realizes he is mentally unhealthy and should be spending the rest of his life quietly resting at home slurping his soup and shaking his fist at the TV.
His daughter thinks demons are involved, but this is a case where an undigested bit of beef might play a bigger role.
I hadn’t listened to this report on his history yet. Yeesh. He is and always been deeply racist — we’re talking cartoonish levels of racism. Just a repulsive shithouse pit of ugly ideas. Why is it that his appointment wasn’t a deal-breaker for Trump? How is he still allowed to whisper in Trump’s ear? Why hasn’t the Mainstream Media jumped on how problematic one of the president’s most important advisors is?
